I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Fanfest day three: Congratulations to CSM9!

CSM9 takes office as of 3 May 2014! The winners are:

Ali Aras and Sion Kumitomo taking the two permanent seats; and,

corbexx;

corebloodbrothers;

DJ FunkyBacon;

Major JSilva;

Mangala Solaris;

Matias Otero;

Mike Azariah;

mynnna;

progodlegend;

Steve Ronuken;

Sugar Kyle; and,

Xander Phoena;

taking the other 12 seats (in alphabetical order).

My initial "I've had 90 minutes to think about this" thoughts?

Things I'm happy about:

Xander Phoena, Sugar Kyle, Steve Ronuken, and Mike Azariah! I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have these four on CSM. All of them were long-shots in a way and I'm so pleased that all of them made it! Congratulations, guys! Now the hard work starts...

Ali Aras takes over the "Jester seat" as the permanent representative facing the Goon representative. I'm very pleased about that! Ali will do a great job and I think she's got the inside track to become Chair. Yes, she's arguably a Goon sympathizer. But she's also in a great position to show experience, good CCP relations, and the ability to bridge the CFC and non-CFC voices on CSM9.

Ironically, I find myself happy that corebloodbrothers is on. I know a lot of you don't like him. But he's walking, talking proof that STV continues to work as it should. The Provibloc was highly motivated this year -- I'll explain why when I do a full analysis of the results -- it showed, and core got in as a result.

Things I'm surprised by:

Wormhole turnout must have been terrible... simply awful. You guys should hang your heads in collective shame. You were a lock to get two seats, in particular for reasons which will become apparent in a day or two. Wormhole voters win the "TEST Alliance Award For Poorest Voter Performance" in the CSM9 election.

Matias Otero. Certainly, he had the votes in terms of Brave Newbie support. But Brave voting seemed to be fairly fragmented and unenthusiastic during the voting weeks and Matias has been kind of a controversial sale. Still, that community apparently came together and did the job for him.

No Russian member! I'll have to go back to previous CSM results and find out the last time that happened. Definitely, a good bit of this was caused by the semi-boycott Russian players apparently participated in that I mentioned a few weeks ago. But it cost them.

Mangala Solaris. Though I shouldn't have been surprised. I completely underestimated his support. Not predicting he'd win was the one really dumb thing I did in my prediction post.

No Psychotic Monk. I have to admit to being a bit pleasantly surprised, but yeah, surprised! This says the ganker/scammer community is not as large, organized, or motivated as I expected they'd be. I'll be very interested to see how many #1 votes he got.

Things I'm a bit sad about:

This is a pretty CFC-heavy CSM, with a good size contingent of CFC members and CFC sympathizers. This is of course fitting given the CFC's strengths in New Eden. But having a wide variety of diverse voices is good for the CSM. If some of those sympathizers don't stay diverse, I'm going to be quite blunt in verbally kicking their asses on this blog.

No DNSBLACK. Now granted, the guy is a lightning rod. But he would have made an excellent CSM and I'm sad he's not going to be part of it. He's the Roc Wieler of this election cycle.

No Russian member, no "localized" client member at all. The CCP localization team is not gonna be happy, and with good reason. Still, did they promote the election? It'll be a good question for CSM9 to ask them when they come calling.

More to come after we see the full results and we start to see how this CSM comes together! But in the meantime, congratulations to the winners! Now I must go to a little Party.

@Edward - you are an idiot. People don't vote because they feel that their individual votes don't count - only votes within a voting block. Voting systems based on popularity, incl. STV, have been proven to establish this behavior.

@Anon406 - Like most theory-based systems developed by political scientists, theory and reality don't mesh (see Communism, Socialism, and US Electoral College).

STV, and all other popularity-based voting systems, only work fairly if everyone votes independently, without resorting to voting blocks. But, since there is no way to prevent voting blocks from occurring in these systems, they don't work in real elections and the will of the organized minority can easily dominate.

Evidence? Look at the CSM election. The null sec players do not represent the majority of the player base, yet they won the overwhelming majority of the seats.

Guys like Mittens aren't stupid, btw. They know how these systems work, too, and how to successfully exploit them. So, don't blame the Goons - blame CCP for being stupid.

I think that a big part of the problem is that it takes a minute for a block voter to open their email, click on the link, log in, select the top 4-6 people on the list and submit their vote.

As an unaffiliated high/low/occasional wh person I listened to the podcast interviews for however many people did them (20+), the Noir. panels, played around with vote matcher a little and read quite a few blogs. Time spent? 16 hours maybe?

That's a pretty huge disincentive to vote. I know CSM members like Malcanis have said to just find someone else's list to follow or just use vote matcher but that presumes pre-knowledge of the meta game. (I.e. already having a trusted person to spoon feed you a list.) It also requires that a lot of people half-ass their vote which I don't think can make for good participation. Also I didn't enjoy using vote matcher this year, I had some trouble with it.

I'm not sure that I have great solutions to these problems. If space was divided into 7 seats with each account being assigned to a seat based on the region in which they spent most of their play time then candidates would have to pick a specific seat to run for so the pool of candidates to research would be much smaller. This would obviously risk disenfranchisement but might yield greater turnout?

I think that I would recommend a plex deposit for each candidate as well. You get the deposit back if you get at least x% of the vote. Helps to weed out joke candidates that don't give a shit and thus keep the number of candidates that you have to wade through unnecessarily down.

Null sec had a strong turnout in general because CCP has been telling the rest of the game to fuck off, low sec residents apparently did not take being completely ignored laying down nice to see Funky and Sugar making the csm.

The GSF/CFC slate was composed of neither exclusively CFC nor null candidates. Some of them may be, as Ripard notes, "sympathizers," but this CSM represents candidates who demonstrated their appeal outside of their immediate groups. For example, Ali seemed to be liked by everyone while Mynnna got support (grudgingly, perhaps, because of his affiliation) outside of his coalition, bloc, and area of space. Voter turn out was likely low, so CFC voting (lead by the highly organized GSF), in particular, had impact. However, to assert that the CFC is instrumental for FunkyBacon's or Mike Azariah's success is unrealistic. Similarly, to presume that these members either support or are affiliated with the CFC's agenda is wrong. Others in that list of "10 out of 14" include a PL candidate who has the support of another highly organized, significant group. Other than James Argent, there is a trend of incumbents getting supported broadly in this election. Part of that reason is why someone like me had nine of his picks be elected. It merely speaks to my participation, along with independents and coalitions (including Goons), to support highly effective members of a great "peace-time" CSM. Credit to GSF for their organization, support of their core candidates, and classy endorsements of quite a broad cross-section of candidates, but the CSM isn't "theirs" as some members of the community decrying; they remain as fearsome and excellent as before these results.

Actually the CSM is theirs. It is that way exactly because of the reasons you mentioned (organization, support for their candidates, etc) and specifically the result of being fearsome and excellent (your words) and not in spite of it as you are arguing.

F**k you all. We dominate the CSM, because we dominate the game. We're smarter than the rest of you, better organized, and CCP knows that the future of the game is driven more by us than anyone else. That's the way it goes and if you don't like, then quit and play WOW.

Or we could just wait for EVE to become more like WoW under your "smarter" and "better organized" influence and save ourselves the trip. Not really sure how your angry and apparently intolerant (F**k you all - your words) vision for the game will result in anything but a sandbox where the bullies get all the cool toys and all the other kids have to play by their rules. I'm sure its knowing that EVE would eventually become exactly this type of compelling game play that you're advocating is what brought the majority of us to New Eden in the first place. We just didn't realize it until until now because we're just not as smart as you.

Yes, they have influence. Do they run the show? No, there are a lot of independent-minded candidates or competitors to "Goons." Besides, "Goons" (whatever we're representing them today as) have demonstrated that they produce some good CSM members. Mynnna is a recent example of this. He taunts like a Goon, but he works like one, too. I don't have a problem with their representation, but to their influence is far from all-encompassing. They have a lot of people's ears, but they don't have their voices.

I'd re-evaluate your "Probably Not Mind Controlled by Le Mittani" list. At least one of those names is a regular contributor to TMC, and as such receives payment from that site for submitted articles. Being on the payroll of the main Goon propaganda site is pretty damning evidence about where sympathies lie.

Blindly believing the world is lying to you at every step is about as bad as blindly believing the world is telling you truth. Being skeptical at every step is all well and good, but that is hardly what you are doing.

Anon 4:23: No, the amount of people prone for conspiracy theories has always been high and is not higher, nor lower than before. Good example is the popularity of antisemitism, nazism, communism and other similar traits that are based on conspiracy theories and thrive because of them.

I'm not convinced that wormhole turnout was terrible, I think that corbexx was actually the only wormhole rep that the wormholers really wanted on the CSM. I know I actively didn't want some of the other options making it on there.

Wormholer with 3 accounts... I didn't vote for any wormhole candidates, mainly because having a wormhole candidate on the CSM made very little difference to WH space in the past. Didn't see the point. I wasn't actually going to vote, but ended up going with your list Jester.

That's exactly it. As a long time wormholer, the only candidate that was worth putting on the ballet was Corbexx. James, while a nice guy was essentially MIA for CSM8. I'm sure people will be like, "James got shit done while Chitsa was the public face!" Well James, letting Chitsa be the face of wormholes got you booted from the CSM. Also, your campaign was terrible.

As far as the other WH candidates, they were not even worth mentioning. One of them had not even been playing Eve for 6 months. That same person also claimed on Down the Pipe podcast that a bought pilot with his SP was equal to years experience in game.

The only thing wspace has to be ashamed of in this election is that we only put forward one candidate worth voting for.

You guys are idiot, by not putting the wormhole 5 ontop of the list you screwed us all in wormhole space!Now we will have to take even more bad drescisions up the tailpipe!Yes, some of the campaigns were terrible but now the CFC is in control and all they want is to wreck T3's, install wormhole stabilizers and give us local.Thanks to you idiots we just lost control of wormhole space!!!!!!!!

Having only 1 wormhole guy is risky. Now I think Corbexx will do a good job but... maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe RL will thrown him a huge curve-ball and he won't be able to be active - these things happen!

WH turnout was no surprise:#1 campaigning was bad or non-existant compared to the past 2 years#2 Chitsa. He managed to alienate a lot of the big corps in a few weeks. Also communitation from him and James was kinda weak over the year.#3 Russians barely voting#4 Industrychanges shanking wormholes, so we get another expansion with nothing positive for our playground.

And the big one#5 CCP just giving 1-3 minor fixes to Wh space or even hurting it in the past years. And then even holding off on the XLSMA fix until fanfest.Even trolling by asking for suggestions about sigspawning and blackholes, then not a word about it for months.

Nr. 1 demand from wormholers has been Posfix for years and every time we get told "next year". Chitsa and James asking for it every day didn´t do anything. It is again on the roadmap for next year. Yeah....We pushed hard for CSM starting with two step but got barely any returns 3 years later. So interest is lower than ever. And will not improve unless one of the winterpatches actually does something incredible. But most likely it will be after the elections for CSM 10. And by then Nullsec will be given solitary access to Jovespace.

How so? I would like to hear the compelling argument(s) for how a CSM dominated by a large null bloc or those sympathetic to them is good for the game as a whole when there are a majority of players that live in high, low, and WH space who's styles of play often suffers in some fashion (be it a through a direct nerf or from lack of attention) because improvements are made for those living in null sec in general or the CFC in particular. Serious question.

@ Darek....yeah, I would never run. I should have made that more clear as a sarcastic comment. I don't want to be subjected to real life harassment. Further, it is an utter waste of time for fight the cartels.

And lastly, running on a platform of being completely obstructionist to any cartel designs, would be seen as "unprofessional" and I am sure that CCP would do everything in its power to disqualify me as a candidate.

yup. that's all you'll ever be, Dins. an obstructionist. you'd be so obsessed with being contrarian that you'd miss the opportunities to respond to CCP's brainstorms that the others dismiss offhand, downplay, or ignore. Noone would vote for an overemotional muckraking fool.

You've become a court Jester, jealous that Ripard stole that moniker from your righteous lapel.

I posted a recommendation list with 9 candidates, and they all got elected, so I guess I'm happy ... but the overall result is CFC heavy and very nullsec heavy. Is this a good thing? Diversity on the CSM is beneficial.

I’m going to be very interested if CCP releases the percentage of eligible players that voted. I suspect if it’s dropped again this year they won’t, because they are rightfully embarrassed.

I see the CSM model having a few challenges.

Given the greater velocity of the software release schedule I wonder if the CSM model is going to be able to scale beyond being the flinch test of features before the real debate moves to a dev blog thread? The developer teams now have a tighter release window than twice a year and it’s obvious that CCP know that change drives retention as we the players get new stuff much more often, creating a more dynamic game.

Moreover if the vote is dropping this will mean that the null sec blocks will eventually be the predominate play style represented on the CSM. That’s not a tinfoil ‘evil blocks’ position, when I read Mynnna’s industry blogs it’s obvious his position comes from the industry player first, null sec player second. The issue could me that as the vote drops if the null sec blocks can hold their voting up their ballot becomes the defacto ticket the CSM will just be seen as a ‘null sec thing’ and overall player engagement in the process will atrophy.

CCP needs to explore other ways to engage the players in product development. The ship rebalancing teams have done amazing work on the forums getting high quality player feedback. That type of deep public engagement should be encouraged.

CCP don’t seem to know how to develop new ways to engage with their community, at least the increasing lack of metrics around voting shows they are embarrassed by it.

With more CSM members you get more stuff done for your space and more bad stuff not going in.Saying that a WH Know csm is useless is being ABSOLUTLY IGNORANT and STUPID.You guys seem to be forgetting all the stuff we DID get like corp bookmarks, SMA's dropping stuff being able to refit subsystems, getting XLSMA's in WH space, GHOST sites in wormholes space, the venture for gasmining,... .Thanks to the IGNORANCE of people in wormhole we ONLY get 1 CSM member.CFC has 10 of the 14 they want!Now ALL things will be tailored to their adavantage.

With all these people complaining about the CSM being null sec heavy and not representative of the whole player base; it makes me think of something.

What if CCP forced every single account to vote before they could get to the character select screen? Obviously, give them a popup each time they logged in, but if they hadnt voted by the last day, then they get forced to do so. Force them to vote even if they try to not log in on the last day.

That will be the one and only way to get *almost* every single account to vote.

Of course though, you will get randoms who just click through the choices and dont care, but thats just a side effect and could be beneficial for some people.

There were seemingly a lot of people who were angry with me about my E1 stance. These people had the opportunity to stand up behind a candidate that shares their basic beliefs even if he doesn't take them as far. The fact that PM didn't get on the CSM says one of two things:

1. Either they didn't stand behind him, which means they're not nearly as motivated and organized as they claim to be; or,2. They did stand behind him, which means they're not as numerous as I thought they were.

Sorry, still confused. You endorsed him, which indicates that you wanted him on the CSM. However, you were "pleasantly surprised" that he was not elected, indicating that you didn't want to see him on the CSM. But if you didn't want him elected, why did you endorse him, thereby suggesting people should vote for him?

The two statements appear to be diametrically opposed, and should preclude each other. The only explanations I can come up with are either a change of mind/heart, split personality, or just plain irrational behavior. If there's some other reason I'm missing, I'd be happy to hear it. As of now, the two views make no sense in light of each other.

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